Ryan plan guts Obamacare, replaces Medicaid with state programs

WASHINGTON – “We stop spending money we don’t have,” declared U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., in a House Budget Committee meeting on the Republican budget proposal for the Fiscal Year 2014.

Yesterday, Ryan along with other House Budget Committee Republicans, released their proposal for a budget entitled, “The Path to Prosperity,” which aims to balance the budget within 10 years, with no raises in taxes and $5.7 trillion in reduced spending over 10 years.

“We match spending with income,” Ryan added, saying that morally the government must live within its means.

“Every family must live within a budget, we believe the government should as well,” he said.

The proposal additionally attacks President Obama’s controversial health care plan, which among other things demands that people of faith violate their religious tenets by funding abortifacients. The plan calls for its defunding and would replace Medicaid with state-run programs through federal block grants.

In Ryan’s plan, he wants to cut the federal workforce by 10 percent, or 200,100, through a two-year hiring freeze.

Ryan says that his proposal “returns government to its proper limit and proper focus.”

Ryan also called for a “simplified” tax code to help accommodate a balanced budget and other fiscal reforms.

Republicans stood united in the committee supporting Ryan’s proposals. Rep. John Campbell, R-Calif., warned that if the proposals are not adopted the United States will end up looking like Spain.

“Spain doesn’t have a prosperous and growing economy,” he said.

He adds this is true, “because they did what we should not do. They spent too much, borrow[ed] too much and let it go on until they had a debt crisis….we cannot let that happen here.”

He said the plan is intended to prevent “what happened in Spain, Greece or Japan…happen[ing] here.”

Meanwhile, on the Senate floor, as the House Budget Committee was convening, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, echoed a similar sentiment. He said, “The federal government is littered with spending that we don’t need.”

The party of the president, who has led the nation into more debt more quickly than any earlier administration, with $1 trillion deficits each year of his presidency, quickly lashed out.

Ryan’s calls to defund Obamacare have received vocal support in the Senate from Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., although lackluster support from House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, who has declared Obamacare “the law of the land.”